Gaming on Linux has been showing Steam Hardware Survey for a while now, but with the data being quite broad and specific only to Steam, we decided to make our own Linux-specific survey. This should give us an idea of metrics within Linux gaming, such as the percentage of users who use Wine, dual boot or what their favourite game retailer is.
The idea is to have the survey running monthly, and then publish the stats at the end of the month alongside Steam Hardware Survey, hopefully shedding some light on a few things which still remain a mystery and over time give an idea of how things evolve. Maybe in the future this may also provide some interesting data to studios looking to make/port games for Linux as well.
The survey is anonymous and is just intended to be a bit of fun, so please don’t try and take it 100 times to boost the stats for your favourite distro or retailer - that would do a great disservice to all of us who looking for some interesting and accurate data. If you have any suggestions on changing the questions or wording of the questions, feel free to write them on here (but bear in mind that SurveyMonkey has a limit of 10 questions for free users) and we may revise the survey next month.
Please feel free to take the survey and share it with anyone who games on Linux - the bigger the sample, the better the data we will have.
EDIT: SurveyMonkey have decided to reveal only after publishing the survey that a free account only allows a maximum sample of 100 people. For this month only, I'll pay the fee, but that still means that the sample is capped at 1000 (and at this rate, it looks like it may go over 1000) so the survey will end once that number is reached. If anyone knows of any free survey tools we can use which don't have sample caps, let me know in the comments or send me a PM so we can do next month's survey on a different site.
The idea is to have the survey running monthly, and then publish the stats at the end of the month alongside Steam Hardware Survey, hopefully shedding some light on a few things which still remain a mystery and over time give an idea of how things evolve. Maybe in the future this may also provide some interesting data to studios looking to make/port games for Linux as well.
The survey is anonymous and is just intended to be a bit of fun, so please don’t try and take it 100 times to boost the stats for your favourite distro or retailer - that would do a great disservice to all of us who looking for some interesting and accurate data. If you have any suggestions on changing the questions or wording of the questions, feel free to write them on here (but bear in mind that SurveyMonkey has a limit of 10 questions for free users) and we may revise the survey next month.
Please feel free to take the survey and share it with anyone who games on Linux - the bigger the sample, the better the data we will have.
EDIT: SurveyMonkey have decided to reveal only after publishing the survey that a free account only allows a maximum sample of 100 people. For this month only, I'll pay the fee, but that still means that the sample is capped at 1000 (and at this rate, it looks like it may go over 1000) so the survey will end once that number is reached. If anyone knows of any free survey tools we can use which don't have sample caps, let me know in the comments or send me a PM so we can do next month's survey on a different site.
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Something which no one picked up on is that the questions should have been time-specific if we were doing this monthly (ie. how many Linux games did you buy THIS MONTH, instead of PER MONTH. There's reasons why I dropped Maths at age 15 in school :P
BTW, "Crash Time," from the Indie Bundle, is one fun little card game that I've been having some fun with.
Most of my games on linux - come from Steam and some of them are probably not really native (wine wrappers what have you). And as I personnaly don't really care if it is native as long as it works without issues - I can't really give an educated answer to this question.
Well anything that is supported by the developers is a good metric to use.